Victor Serge: Unforgiving Years

“When Monsieur Soga calls, tell him I’m in Strasbourg.”

Strasbourg was code for “unforeseen complications.”

Mademoiselle Armande did not turn a hair. No one suspected anything. Unbelievable that They hadn’t moved to place me under internal surveillance months ago! But if the unbelievable were not sometimes a reality, there would be no possibility of struggle. In cramped italics, the secretary was scratching into her diary: “Monsieur Soga. Say Strasbourg…” D, who disliked things to be written down, forced a smile.

“You don’t have much faith in your memory, I see!”

“Oh I do, but it’s funny, I always mix up the names of towns like Edinburgh, Hamburg, Strasbourg, Mulhouse…”

He hadn’t expected that. His throat went instantly dry. In the same code, known to just five people, Mulhouse meant “watch out.”

“And why is that?”

“I’ve no idea, for the life of me! Look, I nearly wrote Mulhouse just now, I can’t help it.”

“I might go to Mulhouse as well,” D said moodily.

He was fixing her with the cold, hard, stony-eyed glare she seldom caught from him — not the look of an art lover. Mademoiselle Armande put on a falsely bright smile, while D rapidly weighed the pros and cons.

“Here’s the key to the bottom right-hand drawer of the small cabinet in the hall. Fetch me the Zürich folder, Monsieur Feuvre, you know, the Swiss collection… The files are not in order, you’ll have to rummage.”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

Naturally, she left her handbag sitting next to the typewriter. D opened it with an unhurried dexterity acquired in the mail-interception department of the Secret Service. He scanned a note signed “Your fondly affectionate, Evariste.” Leafed through the address book. Saw — sickeningly — a telephone number: X 11-47. The number to fear was 11-74. Numeric inversion! Inside his head suspicion exploded into certainty. The returning Mademoiselle Armande glanced at her bag — ah, so we understand each other! D selected a letter from Monsieur Feuvre and put it in his pocket. “Will you kindly put the folder back in the file…” But he took back the keys to the cabinet, and she didn’t ask for them… Right, then; we thoroughly understand each other, thought D. This changed everything. He remembered finding his first taxicab parked and available only a few steps from the house, and how the driver had leaned toward him in a peculiarly obsequious manner… Soon as I leave here, she’ll call 11-74 — or another number, just around the corner perhaps, or in this very building… Made-moiselle Armande, clearly flustered, was struggling to surmount some hesitation or inhibition.

“What’s the matter?” D demanded unceremoniously.

She explained that in Monsieur Malinesco’s absence she would dearly like to take three days off, if that were at all possible, in order to… A matter of an aunt, a small property in the country, Monsieur Dupois. A notary’s letter fluttered out of the handbag.

“But of course,” he stopped her.

The worst of it was the need to distrust himself, to suspect his own suspicions. D saw the number 11-47 printed on the legal letterhead. Reassured, he stopped fretting over Mulhouse. “In addition, you must allow me to offer you a bonus of 500 francs for the last quarter…” You can assess the degree of corruptibility by the way a person accepts money. The sparkle in the young woman’s spectacles was one of innocence.

Just as a magician believes in his little tricks, so D believed in secrets, ciphers, stratagems, silence, masks, and in playing the game impeccably; at the same time he knew very well that secrets are sold, codes deciphered, stratagems outwitted, and silences broken; that masks are easier to read than faces, that the carbon copies of dispatches lie in ministerial wastepaper baskets for the taking, and that the perfect game does not exist. He believed the Organization to be infallible by virtue of its stability, its ramifications, its resources, its power, its single-minded commitment — even by the complicity of its opponents, who feed it, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes as a deliberate ploy. But from the day he had begun to pull away from the Organization, he felt himself rejected by it; and its power behind him, within him, became stifling.

His inner break with the Organization dated back to when the Crime had been revealed. The Crime had burst into view after a long, stealthy approach, like a sinister squadron on the ocean suddenly lighted by searchlights. D had cried out silently to himself, one night, over the newspapers scattered across the rug: “I can’t go on! This is the end of everything!” And nothing meant anything to him any longer in this stupidly snug apartment, where the play-acting only let up after hours — when he could hunch forward in the armchair with the chessboard set up and solve problems, which he inevitably did, since problems are given away in advance, you just have to keep looking, all problems are hollow in the end. Or at night, cozily in bed under cozy lamplight, a glass of lemon water by his elbow, reading a work of physics, since the structure of the atom is probably the only problem left in the universe and they will solve it; then the age of despair will begin. Such mental exercises calmed him but failed to relax him. There is no real peace for those who understand the mechanics of a world moving toward cataclysms, lurching from one cataclysm to the next.

He bid a discreet farewell to the secretary. “Have a nice trip, Monsieur Malinesco… Count on me… They say Strasbourg is a beautiful city…” The ghost of a smile curled the man’s wrinkled face as he teased, circumspect even in laughter, “What’s a beautiful city, Mulhouse?” Mademoiselle Armande was mortified. “Oh, you must think me a child…” “Never that!” he said, and meant it. “I trust that when I return, you’ll be announcing the publication of the banns.” “I might indeed, Monsieur…” she said, with such a glow in her eyes that D felt a twinge of pity. (“When I return — meaning never…”)

How many times have I closed a door behind me, never to return! This time… On the landing, he took a deep breath. The salt sea air could not have been more bracing than this first breath on stepping into the unknown, a relief without joy, indeed mixed with foreboding… Once the unendurable burden has been shed, the back straightens. Glad to have proven equal to the task so far, D reckoned he had at least a forty-eight-hour start on his pursuers. The elevator was moving. He ran down a few steps and stopped short, listening. Someone was mounting the stairs with a heavy, spongy tread he thought he recognized…

This someone was in too much of a hurry to wait for the elevator to come back down. D leaned cautiously out over the stairwell and saw, two floors below, Monsieur Sixte Mougin’s plump gray hand alighting on the banister. Fugitives have instant reflex. D raced up to the fifth floor on tiptoe while his mind rattled off calculations like a crack marksman. The mind can come alive intensely in a few seconds when it engages life without emotion, while the heart beats calmly on, accustomed to the unexpected. A forty-eight-hour start on danger, eh? Not even one, my friend. You’re more like twelve to fourteen hours behind. Old Mougin’s here because they sent him. My message, left yesterday, wasn’t supposed to be delivered in Amsterdam until the morning of the day after tomorrow. I hadn’t foreseen that disinformation could work against me too, that I could forfeit the leadership’s confidence, that the special envoy could have been lying about that invitation to a meeting in Holland — or that he could have given someone else leave to open letters in his absence, those letters no one can open on pain of death… Monsieur Mougin was pressing the doorbell one floor below. Such was the silence around the mechanical hiss of the elevator, D could hear the useful rogue wheezing. The door opened, and clicked shut behind him. The street outside might already be one long trip wire, invisibly hooked up to a dozen traps. D moved the Browning from his trouser pocket to that of his coat: a laughable precaution. He entered the elevator. Inside the mahogany cabin, he deliberately turned his back on the mirror, haunted by the image of a double agent he had once escorted in the elevator of the secret prison: a handsome man with a seducer’s mustache, undone, who was promptly shot. The image of this banal face, cremated into nothing years ago, gave way to a sardonic but highly disquieting idea. What if the mad finger of suspicion had lit on Krantz, the special envoy? In that case a new man, a super-special envoy, would be opening his mail… We live in lunatic times, I shall cut through the lunacy! With this thought D leaped into the street, taking it in in both directions with one glance.